Fusion of sources of evidence with different importances and reliabilities

This paper presents a new approach for combining sources of evidences with different importances and reliabilities. Usually, the combination of sources of evidences with different reliabilities is done by the classical Shafer´s discounting approach. Therefore, to consider unequal importances of sources, if any, a similar reliability discounting process is generally used, making no difference between the notion of importance and reliability. In fact, in multicriteria decision context, these notions should be clearly distinguished. This paper shows how this can be done and we provide simple examples to show the differences between both solutions for managing importances and reliabilities of sources. We also discuss the possibility for mixing them in a global fusion process.